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Facebook Downranks News Feed Links To Crappy Sites Smothered In Ads (techcrunch.com)
Facebook's New Feed algorithm is targeting links that send people to crappy websites filled with advertisements. According to their blog post, Facebook defines a "low-quality site" as one "containing little substantive content, and that is covered in disruptive, shocking or malicious ads." TechCrunch reports: The change could help Facebook fight fake news, as fakers are often financially motivated and blanket their false information articles in ads. High-quality sites may see a slight boost in referral traffic, while crummy sites will see a decline as the update rolls out gradually over the coming months. Facebook tells me that the change will see it refuse an immaterial number of ad impressions that earned it negligible amounts of money, so it shouldn't have a significant impact on Facebook's revenue. Facebook product manager for News Feed Greg Marra tells me Facebook made the decision based on surveys of users about what disturbed their News Feed experience. One pain point they commonly cited was links that push them to "misleading, sensational, spammy, or otherwise low-quality experiences... [including] sexual content, shocking content, and other things that are going to be really disruptive." Today's change is important because if users don't trust the content on the other side of the links and ads they see in News Feed, they'll click them less. That could reduce Facebook's advertising revenue and the power it derives from controlling referral traffic. Getting sent to a low-quality, shocking site from News Feed could also frustrate users and cause them to end their Facebook browsing session, depriving the social network of further ad views, engagement and content sharing.
Facebook Downranks News Feed Links To Crappy Sites Smothered In Ads
In other words, "Do As I Say, Not As I Do."
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
So sorry Slashdot. I guess no Facebook love for you...
BTW, your floating ads and stealing of horizontal space for your shitty ads (are you aware there's a dumbass ad with an Edward Snowden hipster-lookalike on a scooter which is just laughably awful) are making this site suck. Some of the ads don't properly timeout and cause all kinds of scrolling issues.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Wait for it in 10, 9, 8, 7... "Facebook blocks right leaning news on Facebook."
For a while now Yahoo's news has been polluted with the worst sort of clickbait adbombs. Facebook has their work cut out for them if they are trying to be worse.
With all the data mining and deep learning I'm surprised it isn't easier to flag horrible sites. Instead they resort to a pretty obvious and superficial criteria.
It would be extremely easy to get rid of links to shitty clickbait sites. But that would seriously cut into Facebook's revenue. Once again, Facebook is full of shit.
Many web sites, and the FB app, have way too many ads, to the point that I can't even read the screen, and stop going to the site.
And, to be quite frank, it's why I removed FB from my cellphone.
Dudes. You can keep adding more ads, but if I can't see the text, I'm not going to read the site.
I don't care how interactive you make it.
I don't have time to remove twenty ads with close boxes that decide close X means link to site.
I get rid of it. Entirely.
Pennywise. Pound foolish.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's actually not bad advice as a base exercise to start with for public sites that have to comply with accessibility laws. If it's not readable visually in Lynx, there's little to no chance for some poor blind sod who's limited to using screen reader software.
> Facebook defines a "low-quality site" as one "containing little substantive content, and that is covered in disruptive, shocking or malicious ads."
The snarky side of me wants to say "Yeah, like most of the internet". But at very least, like a substantial amount of the Yahoo front page. (I hate listies and will not click on anything that looks like one no matter how interesting or provocative the title.) It annoys me that I can't scan for headlines on the Yahoo front page without discarding half of them in the categories of "they couldn't believe what happened next" (under a photo of a half naked girl) or "the ten ugliest squirrels -- number 7 will make you lose your lunch". Or the latest one -- "this 'white oil' will put oil companies out of business". It's LITHIUM, people! Lithium! For batteries. Get it? Oh dear, I spoiled the surprise.
Does anyone remember when the Seattle PI newspaper website was just swarming with full page popup ads and floating popovers and ads with animation and sound? The site had a tool where you could create your own survey.... and someone created a survey asking readers how much the site resembled a Pr0n site. (a) Not that much, (b) Somewhat (c) Enough to be really annoying (d) I'm expecting to meet LiveJasmine at any moment. They eventually toned down the ads. I wonder if it's because other sites were flagging Seattle PI as a "low quality site"?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The vast bulk of this kind of ad infested crap I see on Facebook is from sponsored content (IE paid ads) that have nothing to do with my actual newsfeed (as in the friends and pages I have elected to follow). They are not viral things being shared, but content actively promoted by Facebook for money. Many of these sites are so polluted with ads and broken up into so many pages you have to click through that they literally are non-functional. I wonder if Facebook is going to reduce their revenue and prevent these kinds of sponsored content?
Better known as 318230.
...will BLOW YOUR MIND!
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Ads? What ads? I don't see any ads.
Oh, you must be one of the dumbasses not using AdBlock?
Which is also going to be one of the techniques used by crappy web site owner :
if the webserver recieves a request from a IP within a known Facebook IP range, then serve instead an ad-less version.
Then it's basically a cat-and-mouse game, as makers of crappy sites try to find better way to detect Facebook's access and Facebook tries to be less obvious (retrieve content through external 3rd party servers, retieve content through the webapp running on the poster's local browser, etc.)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]